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I’m grateful for the quiet clicking of keys in a nearly silent room as I reflect on the start of a month of all things gratitude. As many of you, I’m gonna guess, I did not always practice gratitude. I was neither intentionally grateful or intentionally ungrateful, it just didn’t cross my mind to pencil my grateful-fors in a list.

But I think back to my childhood and the moments I saw squarely that I had far more than I needed and I could be thankful with far less. For these I am grateful.

I walked past homes constructed of leaning pieces of metal in a small village in Thailand. And I knew the rain that unleashed multiple times a day did not spare those houses. My teammates and I once walked uphill through still-pelting rain as water swirled the filth of the streets more than halfway up to our knees. This rain was relentless and no respecter of the houses far from watertight.

It was humbling, and it awakened gratitude from a deep place within me for the things familiar to me that would be extravagant to many others.

I remember, too, the day my team and I spent loving on, and being abundantly loved on in return, by the dear children in a blind and deaf school in Auckland, New Zealand. The physical handicaps that were heart-breaking to see only grew the capacity of their hearts to love, and they taught us how to savor the present moment with no conditions.

For this lasting memory, I am grateful.

It seems surprising to think on summers spent overseas on an evening I’ve left my bonfire-scented jacket on because I just can’t warm up, but I’m thinking about gratitude and this is where I land.

What we’re grateful for changes us

Gratitude changed me even before I intentionally embraced it. It found me in moments like these, nestled into my heart a nugget of truth: a grateful heart is always full.

It’s the paradox of the empty-full life. Our lives can look bleak to the outside eye, but still be abundantly full. We can find ourselves smack dab in the middle of lament or loss or little, yet still be grate-full.

Ann Voskamp contemplates this in the first chapter of One Thousand Gifts, which is titled “an emptier, fuller life.” From her pen:

I wonder too . . . if the rent in canvas of our life backdrop, the losses that puncture our world, our own emptiness, might actually become places to see.

To see through to God.

That which tears open our souls, those holes that splatter our sight, may actually become the thin, open places to see through the mess of this place to the heart-aching beauty beyond. To Him. To the God whom we endlessly crave.

Gratitude fills us because it gives us vision to see beyond the here-and-now to the One who is here right now.

Maybe that’s what you’re longing to hear right now: that God is near. In the middle everything weighing on you and warranting your attention. In the midst of the ways life is emptying you.

So today, let’s pause and whisper, “Thank you” in His ear. Because a thank you makes a way for Him to fill us.

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Begin Within is a series to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well. Gratitude is a theme we talk about often around here because it ties so closely into other missional living rhythms. Practicing gratitude reminds to keep our hearts soft and expectant and our eyes open. Therefore, the more we embrace gratitude, the easier it becomes to truly see our neighbors and where we can join what God is already doing in our neighborhoods.

If you would like to contribute to Begin Within, you can find the submission guidelines here.

Creating Ripples

If you would like to cultivate rhythms in addition to gratitude that will empower you live on mission in your neighborhood, check out Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. This small book will help you make a big impact in your neighborhood as you learn to let missional living flow from the inside out. Get the 30-day missional living challenge free when you purchase the book.